The present invention relates generally to advertising techniques and more particularly to a system and method of providing sideband advertising that non-intrusively embeds sideband content into a main content.
Advertisement has been one of the most important revenue sources for all kinds of media. From conventional media such as newspapers to multimedia such as television, from web pages to streaming media, advertisements are everywhere.
Among the purposes of advertisements are to ensure that the content of the advertisements are remembered by readers and viewers, and to get the attention of readers and viewers, or at least, have the readers and viewers notice the existence of the advertisements. The more frequently an advertisement occurs, the higher the degree of attention paid to it by viewers. However, many viewers don't like to read or view advertisement pages having only advertisements, and therefore, except for a few exceptions like category or advertisement mail or sales channels, most advertisements are combined with other content delivered by the media.
For example, newspapers normally insert advertisement pages with the main content such as news reports and other articles. Television programs broadcast advertisement segments after several minutes of normal program broadcasting. Radio stations broadcast advertisements after several minutes of normal programming. Thus, while readers are reading a newspaper, they will view various ads interspersed with the main content. When a viewer is viewing a television program, in order to view the entire program, the viewer will see the advertisements broadcast during the program. To avoid seeing the advertisements, many viewers switch to another channel whenever the advertisements are shown.
Recently, with the development of the Internet and the World Wide Web, online advertisements have become increasingly popular. Web pages contain many advertisements. For example, almost all portal and news websites include dedicated advertisement blocks in their web pages and advertising space is sold to marketing companies. Advertisements have become an integral part of online content because they are very important sources of revenue.
Advertisements and main content currently coexist side by side. However, to increase the revenue from advertisements, the space dedicated to advertisements is becoming greater and may include an entire page, with the consequence that space dedicated to the main content is decreasing. This often occurs in newspapers where almost half of the newspaper contains dedicated advertisements and the increased size or number of pages does not provide more valuable content to subscribers.
Similarly, the space dedicated to advertisements on web pages is increasing, while the space dedicated to main content in decreasing. This problem is so great that viewers may have to scroll down to skip the spaces occupied by the advertisements. This greatly annoys viewers and also tends to drive viewers to navigate to other sites that contain fewer advertisements. When advertisements become more annoying, they are less readable and effective.
To solve these problems, prior art techniques have been developed including the use of popup advertisements and small moving icons driven by script language displayed on a user's screen. However, these techniques have proven intrusive and advertisement-blocking software has been developed to block those unwanted popup windows and scripts.
Another prior art solution to these problems includes embedding non-intrusive data in main content. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,325,420 to Zhang et al. discloses a method for embedding non-intrusive encoded data in printed matter and a system for reading same. Printed matter has printed informational content. This refers to the content of a given document, which is relevant to the intended reviewer, e.g., the printed text of the letter or pictures. According to the invention, the printed matter also, however, comprises a print control symbol. This symbol is located at a predetermined position on the printed matter, which is separated from the printed informational content. The print control symbol is hidden such that it is not apparent to a reviewer of the printed matter and encodes information concerning the printed matter such as sequencing information, which is relevant to the printing system during printing and mailing, for example. The disclosed system and method concerns printed matter and is only used for copy control or copyright tracking. It does not relate to a method of embedding advertisements nor is it related to sideband control.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,463,585 to Hendricks et al. discloses a targeted advertisement using television delivery systems including a multiple channel architecture that is designed to allow targeted advertising directed to television terminals connected to an operations center or a cable headend. Program channels carry television programs. During commercial breaks in the television programs, advertisements, which are also broadcast on the program channel, are displayed. However, additional feeder channels carry alternate advertising that may be better suited for certain viewing audiences. The patent discloses broadcasting advertisement from separate channels with respect to the main content channel. The disclosed systems do not relate to methods for delivering advertisements over a sideband channel to end-users at the same time as the end-users are receiving the main content.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,157,814 to Hymel et al. discloses a wireless subscriber unit and method for presenting advertisements as a message indicator. The unit and method relate to a non-intrusive method for advertising to an end user of wireless subscriber units that provides for multiple viewing hits of the same advertisement and does not relate to display advertisements in sideband channels.
U.S. Patent Application Pub. No. 2004/0015608 to Ellis et al. discloses a method and system for dynamically incorporating advertising content into multimedia environments. Embodiments of the disclosed invention provide computer-based methods and systems for providing a minimally intrusive mechanism that allows a content provider such as an advertiser to dynamically incorporate content, such as advertisements, into a video game or other target communication device or multimedia presentation. Example embodiments provide a dynamic inserter for enabling a player of a video game to experience advertisements incorporated into the game itself. These advertisements are dynamically updated as play progresses and may be incorporated into individual behaviors of objects within the game. The advertisements are not embedded in the content.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,654,725 to Langheinrich et al. discloses a system and method for providing customized advertising on the world wide web. The advertising system has a database server which stores advertisements and their campaign information, and an advertisement server which generates electronic advertisements available to a client system. In the system, a customization process which customizes the electronic advertisements to be delivered to each client system is performed. A user connects to a web site and is presented with an editorial page or a list of search results. The system inserts a customized advertisement into the page that matches the page content or search topic. The customized advertisement is not embedded in the content of the page.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,381,341 to Rhoads discloses a watermark encoding method exploiting biases inherent in the original signal. Where such biases exist, relatively less watermark energy can be applied. The disclosed method does not however relate to the presentation of advertisements in sideband channels.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,879,701 to Rhoads discloses tile-based digital watermarking techniques. A tile-based arrangement is employed to effect watermarking of plural-bit auxiliary data into still or moving digital images. In a particular embodiment, the plural-bit auxiliary data is represented as a rectangular block of overlay data. This block is repetitively tiled, both vertically and horizontally, across the image, and combined with the image data to effect the encoding. The disclosed techniques do not however relate to the presentation of advertisements in sideband channels.
“Steganography And Digital Watermarking” by Jonathan Cummins et al. School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham. (2004) discusses the history of steganography. Also discussed are digital rights and copyright marking and requirements of hiding information digitally, embedding and detecting a mark, types of steganography, binary file and text file techniques to hide some secret information such as line shift coding protocol, word shift coding protocol, feature coding protocol, feature coding protocol for text content, XML for image techniques such as simple watermarking, LSB—Least Significant Bit Hiding (image hiding), direct cosine transformation or wavelet transformation; sound techniques such as spread spectrum, MIDI, MP3, and other techniques including video and DNA; detections and attacks such as basic attacks, robustness attacks, presentation attacks, interpretation attacks and implementation attacks. The article states that as steganography becomes more widely used in computing, there are issues that need to be resolved. Disclosed are a wide variety of different techniques with their own advantages and disadvantages.
“The Steganographic File System” by Ross Anderson, et al. Information Hiding, Second International Workshop, IH'98, Portland, Oreg., USA, Apr. 15 {17, 1998, Proceedings, LNCS 1525, Springer-Verlag, ISBN 3-540-65386-4, pp. 73 {82 outlines first designs for encrypted file stores with a plausible-deniability mechanism, which are called steganographic file systems. These aim to provide a secure file system where the risk of users being forced to reveal their keys or other private data is diminished by allowing the users to deny believably that any further encrypted data is located on the disk. The paper focus on steganographic file systems that are designed to give a high degree of protection against compulsion to disclose their contents.
“Detecting Steganographic Content on the Internet” by Niels Provos et al. (2001) discusses ways to detect steganographic content. Steganography is used to hide the occurrence of communication. Recent suggestions in US newspapers indicate that terrorists use steganography to communicate in secret with their accomplices. In particular, images on the Internet were mentioned as the communication medium. While the newspaper articles sounded very dire, none substantiated these rumors. To determine whether there is steganographic content on the Internet, this paper presents a detection framework that includes tools to retrieve images from the world wide web and automatically detect whether they might contain steganographic content. To ascertain that hidden messages exist in images, the detection framework includes a distributed; computing framework for launching dictionary attacks hosted on a cluster of loosely coupled workstations. Two million images downloaded from eBay auctions were analyzed and a single hidden message was not found.
There remains a need in the art for a system and method of providing sideband advertising that non-intrusively embeds sideband content into the main content. There is also a need for a system and method of providing sideband advertising that does not require dedicated space for advertising content. There is a further need for a system and method of providing sideband advertising that provides sideband content that is associated with the main content. There is also a need for a system and method of providing sideband advertising that is perceived subconsciously by viewers and listeners of the main content. There is a further need for a system and method of providing sideband advertising that effectively reaches the intended audience.